Is Evolution Anti-Christian? Conor Cunningham, Charles Darwin, and the God who Creates

Dear Friends and Family, While there is even bigger news I would like to discuss at some point, namely a new Pope and what that should mean for non-Catholic Christians (see, for the time being, Peter Steven’s excellent post on this subject), for the today I want to do a short post on evolution. Particularly in “conservative”, lower Protestant churches (meaning churches that focus on the authority of the Bible and don’t have an official liturgy), evolution as a scientific theory is seen as anti-Christian. It tells us that God had nothing to do with creation, that we are just an accident and are descended immediately from apes and distantly from protozoan slime. Well, according to Dr Conor Cunningham this is not the case. Conor is a professor here at the University of Nottingham (though he is currently at Princeton as a kind of visiting research fellow) and is often seen as something of a rock star. If John Milbank is the brains, and often words, of Radical Orthodoxy (something I’ll blog about later), then Conor is the face and voice of Radical Orthodoxy here at Nottingham. While I’m getting ready to write my next chapter on Deification and Creation, I’ve been reading Conor’s book, Darwin’s Pious Idea. I’m not done with it yet, but it has been an excellent and challenging read. Ultimately what Conor is trying to say is that science in general and evolution in specific are not anti-Christian. In fact, Conor sees fundamentalist Creationists (people who not only believe in a literal six-day creation, i.e. the world was created exactly as described in Genesis 1, but also think you must believe this) and Ultra-Darwinists (people like Richard Dawkins who think that Darwinian evolution explains just about everything we need to know about life) are anti-Christian and anti-evolutionary. Below I’ll embed some videos of Conor talking about evolution and Nature and Grace (a topic I may introduce at a later date). I know that for many this notion that Christianity and evolution can coexist might seem rather odd and maybe even heretical. If that’s you, I definitely recommend you check out these videos as well as Conor’s book. If anything, I hope these help you see that Christianity and science don’t have to be at odds and that there is more than one way to read the Bible. What do you think, especially after watching these videos, are evolution and Christianity at odds or does the notion that all nature is graced and upheld by God help us make sense of how creation and evolution can work together? For more videos from the University of Nottingham go here. Yours, David